The Daily Grind

It’s unusually good tea, this.

I’ve never understood that. I use the same tea supply, day in, day out. The same water, from the same tap. I’m reasonably ritualistic about the process, warming the pot (pottery, not metal), two bags, sloshing in water at a running boil, and all that. The milk is very carefully quality-controlled, doubtless. I aim for a regular shade of old-fashioned warehouse-worker’s coat beige. Same small set of mugs from which I make a daily selection (current favourites: SF:MOMA and Bernard Shaw Penguin)

Yet, some days my tea is subtly more pleasing than others.

It’s hard to define. It’s the difference between ‘Mmm, tea’ and ‘Ooh, tea’. I’ve never managed to work out the details.

More experimentation required.

Regarding today’s xkcd, Flossie just emailed:

Did you see the note that said ‘interestingly, on a true vertical log plot I think the Eiffel tower has straight sides’?
If I didn’t already love you, I think I’d be mildly in love with him.

‖ ulp ‖

Iron. Taken at Blist’s Hill open-air museum. I’m using the large version of this (click the picture to find it at Flickr) as a desktop picture at the moment: it’s rather nice.

I’ve never managed to make it to The Tuttle Club, which is a crying shame since they’ve outgrown their first home and are about to move to the ICA. There’s lots of excitement about this, and quite right too.

However, I can’t quite get past my initial impression of the ICA, which is relevant in the context.

See, back in 1994, shortly after the first ‘cybercafé’ (remember those?) Cyberia opened, the ICA held a new media/art/technology crossover event called ‘Terminal Futures.’ It was, frankly, a thoroughly ghastly event surrounded by people who thought the internet’s sole purpose was to serve as a canvas for their own egos.

I do hope Tuttle avoids the same fate.

Over the weekend, I had problems upgrading installs of both WordPress and Movable Type. The latter you may have noticed if you stopped by here at any point.

I find the implications troubling, so I’m going to indulge in a bit of an essay. The non-web-geeks amongst you should probably skip this post.

Continue reading “Blog systems” →

The irregular reader may have noticed a few changes around here, including but not restricted to a rather extended period over the weekend where everything was broken.

Oops.

So, I’ve brought my Movable Type install up-to-date, and switched to the Mid-Century template set, which is a dashed sight prettier than the defaults I was using before. There are serifs, and everything.

The sidebar is still acting a bit funky (‘Recent Comments’ should be more like ‘Random Comments,’ but hey, that’s interesting too), and submitting comments is still a little borked (it works, but the system might not give you much confidence in it having done so).

Meanwhile, I’ve moved my funky Action Stream into a separate page, linked from the new bar above. It aggregates what I’ve been doing around the web for the last week.

At some point I’ll try to integrate that stuff into the flow of the main blog. However, the instructions for doing that look a tad painful, and I should combine that with collating actions together so Twitter and Flickr stuff doesn’t spew all over the page. Eu.

That, however, looks far too much like hard work.

Aaaanyway: looks like we’re back. More-or-less.

…

Hmm. I need to get some green back in, somewhere.

Test post to see if things are still working around here. I have my doubts.

Update: things are indeed pretty broken. Gaaah.

I like walls.

The typeface everyone loves to hate finally has a natural habitat: transcriptions of Sarah Palin interviews. Brilliant. [via Tim Duckett]

See also: Palin interview with CBS, and this College Humour take on the whole ‘Caribou Barbie’ hockey mom thing.

If Americans actually vote for these idiots, can the rest of us bring a case in the international courts for them being criminally negligent as a nation?

Flossie and I were in North Yorkshire for a few days, earlier in the week. Heading down to the Mallyan Spout (a waterfall, which seems obvious once you know despite being mysterious when you first hear the name), I spotted these toadstools. Hopping the fence, Flossie delighted in her natural environment – vis. grubbing around in the mud – to snag this photo.

Shiny.